Meet Melissa Click: A college professor who made a name for herself in a way she will long regret

Of all the madness that has been taking place at the University of Missouri-Columbia campus the last week or so, here’s what puzzled me most:

What the hell was an assistant professor of communications doing trying to block a couple of journalists from getting access to a group of student protesters?

Although you haven’t seen them in The Star, widely disseminated photographs show Melissa Click, the professor, trying to stop a student photographer, Tim Tai, from photographing the protesters on Monday.

First of all, why would Click involve herself in a student protest? It appeared as if the students were doing OK for themselves, having brought down the president of the university system and the Columbia chancellor.

But there she was Monday (below), wearing an angry frown and calling for “muscle” to help remove another young man who was recording the confrontation between herself and Tai.

This from a communications professorwith a Ph.D., whoapparently didn’t understand the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech and assembly on public ground.

Here’s part of the exchange between Click and cameraman Mark Schierbecker:

Schierbecker: I’m media. Can I talk to you?Click: No, you need to get out! You need to get out!Schierbecker: No I don’t.Click: You need to get out.Schierbecker: I actually don’t.

Student photographer Tim Tai

Tai, who is only 20, and Schierbecker handled themselves respectfully and professionally, asserting their right to stand their ground and resisting any urge to angrily engage Click. Even at my age and with my background, I’m not sure I could have been that restrained.

Tai said later:”I wish she had handled the situation differently, but as a journalist it really just became part of the scene I was presented with and I never took her or anyone else’s actions personally.”

…Click’s background and areas of professional focus are, shall we say, a bit out of the mainstream. Perhaps that helps explain how she wandered off the beaten path Monday.

Her bio, on the university’s website, cites her research interests as “popular culture texts and audiences” and says her work “is guided by audience studies, theories of gender and sexuality, and media literacy.”

The website goes on to say that her current research projects include “the impact of social media in fans’ relationship with Lady Gaga, masculinity and male fans, messages about class and food in reality television programming, and messages about work in children’s television programs.”

Her doctoral dissertation was about the “commodification of femininity, affluence and whiteness in the Martha Stewart phenomenon.”

Her bio prompted Maureen Sullivan, a contributing writer at Forbes, to write an article titled “Why do Parents Hate Paying College Tuition? Meet Missouri Professor Melissa Click,” in which Sullivan said Click “crystallizes the view that tuition dollars are spent on nonsense, and sometimes worse.”

Click has been affiliated with MU since 2003, and she became an assistant professor in 2008.

MU officials have given no indication of how Click’s antics might affect her employment status, but her department issued a statement rebuking her actions.

The University of Missouri Department of Communication supports the First Amendment as a fundamental right and guiding principle underlying all that we do as an academic community. We applaud student journalists who were working in a very trying atmosphere to report a significant story. Intimidation is never an acceptable form of communication.

To her credit, Click issued an unequivocal apology, which Tai accepted.

…I do not know if Click has tenure, and, in any event, I would be surprised if she was fired. But I would think her chances of becoming a full professor have been greatly reduced.

All in all, she would have been a lot better off spending Monday doing more research on Lady Gaga instead of trying to emulate a Kansas City Chiefs lineman.

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16 Responses

Call it karma, or the chickens coming home to roost but we now have a case of a “beloved” professor resigning because he stood up to the bullies and was pilloried by the fascists at Salon and The Washington Post. http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=6971

Tenure and academic freedom have no meaning in such a totalitarian environment, witness the attacks on the prof over a dust up about Halloween costumes at Yale.

All of this is just the tip of the iceberg. Now that Mizzou’s (losing) football team has demonstrated its power, think of what would happen in a winning program. Protests are already occurring at K-State and KU, imagine if Self’s team demanded the ouster of the Chancellor.

This has been a long time coming. Most of my mentors were hardened men of the left, protesters during the 60’s with solid academic credentials to back them up and most of them are now cowering in their offices awaiting retirement, hoping that it arrives before some little punk denounces them for being “reactionary”, or worse yet, sexist, for using the wrong pronouns whilst reading Marx aloud. Indeed one, now the chair of a prestigious department refuses to mentor women lest one denounce his rigorous standards as a “male way of thinking”.

Dad, a WWII vet, was never afraid to use NAZIism and Hitler as a litmus test to even the most trivial questions involving freedoms, especially the 1st Amendment…this one applies…signs in front of Belsen 1938: No Media, Safe Space… “Hey, who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here!”

I think he would have been — had UMKC not blown it with Bloch Business School scandal. Not only with the scandal itself, but turning its p.r. machine against The Star’s report — until the school had to admit The Star was right. As usual.

Regardless of where you are on the political scale a world absent multiple and diverse opinions is a very chilling thought. I spent a great deal of time in academia studying the rise of Nazism and every last one of us has the potential of becoming a good Nazi absent a healthy and diverse marketplace of ideas and the structural controls to prevent us from bullying those with opposing ideas. Those protections seem to have evaporated at Yale and MU.

I agree with the commenter (on Whitlock’s piece) who said Jason showed a lot of promise when he started at The Star but has wandered off into no man’s land. I think he’s all about shock value….When he left The Star, some publications said he got a $2 million contract with Fox Sports (which he has since left and gone back to) over three years. I have never believed that; he probably planted that story himself.

Two video journalists banned from Yale campus after trying to interview administrators about Jason Killheffer, Yale’s director of academic integrity programs, literally ripping up the Constitution, then asking Dean Holloway to have it removed from campus.

My freshman year at Temple’s School of Communication I had an instructor who had been recruited into the OSS in WWII and was a pioneer in Philadelphia tv news.

Others through the years included a former Philadelphia Inquirer newsman dragged kicking and screaming to Annenberg’s WPVI-TV new. Later he worked with Edward R. Murrow (at CBS and in government agencies), was the editor of the CBS Evening News/Good Morning America/Nightly Business Report).

Another was a grad student who worked with James Michener writing What Happened. Also a bio on Michener which revealed Michener’s father had died two-years before his birth.

Ms Glick seems to follow the tend I found when I returned to college 10-years later. The typical instructor had never worked for a newspaper, sold a short story or worked in a day job in journalism. They all came fresh from school.

And everyone of those industry-proven professors (they were full professors too and not adjunct or grad students) asked us why on Earth we wanted this degree. Told us to get a degree in history, political science or English which would serve us better. What we would learn in four-years of study could be picked up by on-the-job experiences. A degree in Communications was designed for the academic and not the real world.